Labor is a strong supporter of the new hospital and committed $110 million at the 2013 election to fund its construction.

While the new 116-bed facility is state-of-the-art, there are growing fears that inadequate Morrison Government funding will stretch staff to exhaustion.

The Liberals have cut $16 million from NT hospitals between 2017 and 2020 – the equivalent of 45 nurses, 40,000 outpatient visits or 25,000 emergency department presentations.

Now the Liberals are trying to lock these cuts in for another five years.

And as if that wasn’t bad enough, the Government is now trying to rip an extra $600 million out of the nation’s public hospitals through retrospective changes to its accounting formula.

Every state and territory – Labor and Liberal alike – oppose those cuts and have now taken the unprecedented step of escalating the dispute to an official COAG process.

Federal Labor is committed to working with the NT Labor Government to get a better deal out of the Liberals.

While Morrison is busy looking for new ways to tear money out of hospitals, Labor has a plan to deliver an extra $2.8 billion in hospital funding across the nation – including in the NT.

Labor’s Better Hospitals Fund will benefit every public hospital in Australia by restoring the core funding cut by the Liberals, reducing elective surgery and emergency department wait times and funding new hospitals, wards and clinics.